In this installment of my Redesign series, I’m going to discuss contact methods.

For a services site like mine, contacts from prospective clients are necessary to close a sale. For an ecommerce site, contact will mainly be geared toward support or providing additional information to existing customers after or during the sale process. For informational or brochureware sites, contact is most likely to take the form of a conversation between the author and their readers. There is a great deal of overlap between these three categories of contact, but there is no one single right way to provide contact that applies to every website.

The most common methods of contact are:

• Phone
• Mailing/street address
• Email
• Contact form
• Social networking sites
• Ticketing systems and on-site private messaging
• Forums
• Individual page comments

Let’s look at each individually.

Phone

Until the relatively recent ascendance of email, the phone was the most common means of communication in the country. It is still the case that many consumers will distrust a business that does not have or does not publish their phone number. There’s a sense that as long as there’s a phone number, you can get through to a real live person.

For that reason, I always suggest that any business website should include a phone number. Personal (non-business) websites usually won’t include a phone contact, but there’s very little excuse for a reputable business refusing to make their phone number available.

That said, especially with the economy the way it is right now, there are more and more home-based or shared-office businesses cropping up. When they’re first starting, it’s unlikely that these businesses will have the capital to purchase a dedicated phone line just for the business. It’s better to leave the number off the site if the phone is likely to be answered casually by other members of the household, to avoid sounding unprofessional to your potential clients.

There are also privacy concerns if you use a home phone number. If you don’t have a dedicated phone line for business, make sure you discuss the number’s use for your business with everyone else who lives there (or shares the space, for a shared office) to be sure they’re comfortable with having their phone number broadcast to everyone who has an internet connection.

Another concern is if your number is a cellphone and in a wildly different area code from your office. Mine, for instance, is a Milwaukee-area exchange, because I’ve had that number for the better part of ten years and used it that long for business. Changing it now would entail a pretty arduous process to update all my past and present clients, family, friends and other contacts. I live in the San Francisco area now, but few here would recognize the 262 area code as being a local business.

Google offers a service where you can reserve a phone number and have it redirect to any other number, Google Voice. This is an easy way to keep an old number active but present a local number on your website. I have a number through Google Voice in the 510 area code that redirects to my cellphone, but using it as my sole number on the site might confuse existing clients who are expecting the old number.

So in my case, I will be putting both numbers on the site. They both go to my personal cellphone, so there is little chance of someone else in the house answering them. As I have a number that only I will answer, there’s not much reason to invest in a second line that only I would answer. Also, my voicemail is incredibly reliable (thank you T-Mobile), so I don’t need a land-line for an answering machine.

One caution for including your cell phone or home number: people will assume they can use that number at any time of day or night, regardless of any working “available” hours you post. You should decide how you will handle that before listing your number. Personally, I don’t answer the phone outside of normal business hours unless I recognize the number. I started doing this to avoid telemarketers, but it also has the effect of keeping my work to my workday. You should find the method that works for you for finding a balance being available to clients and maintaining a personal life.

Mailing/street address

Street addresses are less ubiquitous than phone numbers. If your company works out of a corporate office or has retail locations, you will always want to include those addresses, but for many service-oriented or home-based businesses, the people involved will not have a specific office location, or that location will be a residence, not just an office. Many service oriented workers will, for instance, use their truck/van as their office and their email and phone number as main contact points, so there is no “walk-in” location. These businesses do have mailing addresses (most places that’s a legal requirement to call yourself a business), but they are not locations that they want broadcast to the whole world, and not locations they want clients to drop in at unexpectedly.

As with phone numbers, if the location is shared with anyone else, you need to take their privacy into consideration. My “home office” is literally an office in my home, and there is a child living in the home with me. Because of that, I will not publicize my address, though obviously any clients I do business with will be given my address for non-digital correspondence and shipping. I’m ok with clients having that address because I will have a chance to assess them before accepting them as clients. Anyone I wouldn’t trust with my address is someone I wouldn’t be likely to take on as a client either.

I considered opening a PO Box to use for business but generally anything I’m going to need to ship will require large padded envelopes or boxes to protect the materials, and the most common mail I receive from clients is CDs of images. Dealing with these materials at a PO Box is generally a hassle and the last time I tried it, I found I actually lost money from all the time I was spending waiting in line to get packages at the counter that I could have been spending on client projects.

Email

Email is quite possibly the most common method of communication in the world today. Nearly everyone has one, many people have several. I have five, and I use each for a different aspect of my life (it also cuts down on getting spam at the addresses I use for business because those email addresses never get used for registering on websites). If you have a website but not an email contact address, don’t be surprised if consumers think you’re probably behind the times — a sentiment they will carry over and expect from your service as well, whether true or not.

There are a number of free email services out there if you don’t get an email address with your web hosting. These days if you’re going to use a free service, you should probably choose Gmail strictly based on the perception of the domain your email is attached to. Hotmail and Yahoo are also popular choices but the general perception is that their email services are less “professional” or “reliable,” because they are more commonly hacked than Gmail. That perception may be exaggerated when compared to the reality of those services, but what really matters is how your clients will perceive your email address.

That being the case, it’s best to have an email address that matches your domain name, rather than matching one of the free services. For instance, I use crys at crysodenkirk dot com (that’s Crys, short for Crystal).

info@, admin@ and webmaster@ are all common email addresses that people will use when they don’t know your email address, but they’re also the most common recipients of spam, since they’re set up on most domains. For a larger company, or one with higher turnover, the utility of a generic email address will outweigh the spam and indiscriminate and unfocussed queries that will come to those addresses. However, my service is me and only me, so using my own name, crys@, has the double benefit of making emailing me feel more like you’re reaching a real person, while cutting down on the spam I receive to my work address.

Contact form

A contact form is a portion of a web page where viewers can type information into the page and then perform an action (usually clicking a button) to send that information to someone at the business.

The main benefit of a contact form over email is that you can set it up so that viewers can’t send you the form without including all the information you require from them. It’s less uncommon than you might think to get a phone message that says “email me a quote for X” without giving you either an email address or a return phone number. You can require either or both fields to be filled in before allowing a user to submit the form, however, making that scenario less likely. That doesn’t guarantee they’ll give you correct information, but they will at least have to stop and think about providing it.

Contact forms also have the benefit of potentially being the customer-side interface for an internal support structure by routing that information into a database instead of an email. I’ll touch on that a little more under “ticketing systems.”

The downside of a contact form is that they’re spam and hack magnets. They require more work to make secure than a page that viewers don’t input information to and you will always get some spam through a contact form. You can do things to obscure the form and disrupt the standard sorts of attacks, but there’s no foolproof way to eliminate all spam.

You also have to make sure that you’re only requiring information that you actually require in order to help them. If you don’t truly, absolutely, require a home address in order to respond, don’t require it! When you require more information than you actually need, it turns users off and they are unlikely to finish filling out the form because you’re slowing them down in their goal (sending you a message) and it can feel invasive.

I’m going to make so many other methods of contact available that I don’t think I need a form immediately with this redesign and reconfiguration. However, it would be very useful to include a way for clients to easily request quotes from me, and to make sure that when they do request a quote, they include all the information I need to be accurate. So as a future project, I will be creating a “Request A Quote” contact form that requires certain information from the user before allowing them to send it to me. I’ll file this under “Phase 2” of the redesign.

Social networking sites

These days, it seems like you have to have a twitter and facebook account for your business. That’s where consumers are, the theory goes, so you have to have a presence there.

That’s true, to a point. But social sites move quickly and people expect instant responses from them. Whether or not you branch out into social media depends on your ability to engage with it. It does you no good to have a facebook page if you don’t ever answer questions on it or if you’re going to censor what people say on it. You can’t control your brand appearance as tightly in a free-for-all environment, so if that’s going to be a problem, you’re better off finding different ways to connect.

This is a complex topic that would entirely side-track this series if I let it, so I’m going to say here that there are serious decisions to be made about which social sites you participate in or if you get involved with them at all, and how you interact with them. When it’s done well, it can really give customers a sense of community and give them a buy-in on your product and on getting more consumers involved with your product. The best social media use I’ve ever seen is HBO’s Game of Thrones social campaign from Campfire in New York (that could be yet another series of articles in its own right). Your social presence doesn’t have to be as elaborate as that one, but it must be as engaged with the people who interact with it. You must be willing and capable of generating and maintaining a sense of community. That’s the secret to effective social marketing.

Which social media sites you get involved with will depend on your industry and who you’re trying to reach. The big four general sites are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and the newest “must have,” Google+. In addition to those, there will likely be industry-specific and niche sites that cater to your target audience.

For my initial redesign, I’m going to include the Big Four, in the form of links to my profile on each site. For Phase 2 of the Redesign I will be writing a bit on niche and web development/design communities, and how I’m going to integrate those into the site along with different ways you can integrate with social media beyond just links. This is about ways to contact me, and clients are unlikely to be on those niche and industry sites, so including them does not directly benefit our primary goal with the site, so off to Phase 2 they go.

Ticketing systems and on-site private messaging

These are both examples of “threaded” messaging. That involves keeping every exchange in a single conversation in the order its made and displaying them sequentially, usually on one page, but possibly broken over several pages if the conversation is very long.

Threaded messaging has all the advantages of email, plus a few more. Some systems can keep all messages associated with a certain client bundled together so that you don’t have to dig through a year’s worth of email. With ticketing, it’s easy for a client to log in and see an updated status on their question whenever they want.

The downside is that you have to assign someone to answer and maintain the messages, and you have to have a program on your site that collects and displays the messages. The cost of that can outweigh the utility.

I would like to have a ticketing system that I can use with clients to help my workflow and to help them feel like they’re a bigger part of the process. It would be very useful to me to have a workflow that involves a system of delivering proofs and getting a digital signature ok on the proof, without having to maintain the records in different places.

However, I don’t already have that written and it is not a base necessity for meeting the goal of the site. Since programming a custom ticketing system is such a big project, I’m going to set that aside as its own phase of the redesign.

Forums

Forums are a form of threaded messaging where each thread is available to an entire community rather than being between just two people, where anyone in the community can comment on it.

Forums are about creating community. Most of what I wrote above about social media applies to forums. At a bare minimum you need community managers and moderators to maintain the forum and keep conversations going, or to step in when the inevitable fight happens.

Forums are not appropriate to this site. If I get a large number of other designers coming here because of my project articles and tutorials, I will revisit my decision not to include a forum.

Individual page comments

This is, like a forum, a community-based threaded messaging format. The difference between page comments and a forum is that anyone can start a thread on just about anything in a forum, but page comments are meant to be remarks on the content of just one page’s subject. They’re mostly confined to news or blog style pages.

I’ll be leaving comments open on most of my pages. I welcome feedback on my writing and work.

Location, location, location!

You can put contact information anywhere, but it’s best to make it prominent. I prefer to have contact information on every page, and the footer is a good place to make it clear and available without making it the focus of every page. I will include my cell numbers, my email address, and my social networking links in the footer.

The other methods of contact I discussed implementing will all need their own page or subsection. Comments will be on the page they’re referring to, but that means each page will have its own thread of comments. A quote form will require enough information to merit its own page, and of course a client hub with ticketing would be behind password protection in its own subsite.

In summary, I am including:

• My cellphone number
• My Google Voice number with Bay Area area code
• The email address attached to this domain
• A “Request a Quote” form, in Phase 2.
• Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ profiles with niche and industry sites to be discussed and added in Phase 2 along with integrations with social media
• Ticketing system and client hub, implemented in Phase 3
• Comments on articles

In the next article in this series, I’ll be discussing “What I Can Do” and how to best convey that to potential clients.